Charlotte Linde has been a Senior Research Scientist in the Computational Sciences Division, Work Systems Design and Analysis Group at NASA Ames Research Center since 2000, working on issues of knowledge management, human centered computing and work systems design and evaluation. She conducts research on human centered computing and the design of work systems, including specific instances, as well as the development of methodology and theory. She also studies institutional remembering, focusing on the question of how institutions learn, and the technological and social ways in which this learning is remembered. She has been a member of the MER HCC research team, which collects ethnographic, linguistic and cognitive data and uses it for the analysis of the work of the science team of the Mars Exploration Rover mission, and to contribute to the design of supporting technology for that team. She is a member of NASA Agency-wide Knowledge Management Team, focusing on cultural issues in knowledge management at NASA. She has conducted ethnographic research on the social construction and use of large-scale data bases.

She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in linguistics. She has used her training in sociolinguistics and anthropology to study the use of language in a variety of work, school and recreational settings. She is the author of Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence, a study of how people construct the events of their lives into a coherent story. Her current research examines the ways in which institutions use narrative to remember their identity and history, and to induct new members into these ongoing stories. Such institutional narrations can be viewed as knowledge management in its natural habitat: hardly noticed, ubiquitous, and effective. Overall, her research has focused on how people use language to accomplish their work and use narrative to establish and negotiate identity. This has included studies of the factors of effective and ineffective communication in commercial aviation accidents, the negotiation of authority in police helicopter crews, the social structure of the learning of new technologies and its implications for technology design, the structure of on-line communities, the evaluation of effective on-line outreach programs, and the social component of the construction of a data base.

Prior Experience

Institute for Research on Learning, Senior Research Scientist (1989-2000):

Research projects included study of narrative and other mechanisms for the maintenance of institutional memory; ethnographic study of work systems as a basis for technology design; use of video analysis as an assessment technique for innovations in engineering education; ethnographic and interview-based study of the reasons for the success of a an Internet community for seniors; study of how new technology is learned and its effects on workplace organization; observational and cognitive analysis of mathematics learning and use in the workplace; ethnographic study of the work of sales agents, including the construction of understanding in sales conversations and relation of motivation in the workplace to issues of identity and career trajectory.

NASA Ames Research Center, National Research Counsel Senior Research Associateship, Rotorcraft Human Factors, Code IH (1987 - 1989):

Research included observational and video based study of the work of civilian helicopter pilots, to discover safety issues related to communication factors.

Structural Semantics (1978 - 1989): Founder and Managing Partner of this research and consulting company, which applied linguistic and social science methods to problems of small group communication and social dynamics.

Structural Semantics projects included:

NASA Ames Research Center: 1981-1987 Application of methods from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics to transcripts of air crew communication in accident situations and simulations of normal and problem flight, to discover effective and ineffective linguistic structures, and to provide recommendations for crew training. Designing, conducting and supervising research on work group communications and social structure in a variety of settings, including police teams, hospital-based emergency medical helicopter operations, and commercial aviation crews.

Office of Naval Research: 1982-1985 Investigation of the language of teaching in a multi-media setting, including non-verbal communication and visual semiotics, in order to discover effective explanation strategies for training novices in technical tasks.

University of Michigan, English Language Institute: 1980-1981 Consulting on the design of research on second language learning and teaching, and retraining instructors in research methods. Counseling graduate students in linguistics on employment opportunities.

Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center: 1979-1981 Consulting on research design for the Rape Prevention and Treatment Project, providing an analysis of the literature of rape prevention and treatment, including major themes, implicit value systems, and implications for treatment, and assisting in the design of counseling and treatment materials based on this analysis.

Planning Mars Memory: Learning from the Mars Mission
Charlotte Linde
Knowledge management for space exploration is part of a multi-generational effort at recognizing, preserving, and transmitting learning. Each mission should build on the learning in the successes and failures of prior missions. Learning is the first step in knowledge production. The Mars Exploration Rover mission provides an opportunity to track how learning occurs, how it is recorded, and whether these representations might be optimized for subsequent missions. This paper focuses on the MER science and engineering team during rover operations. A NASA team conducted an observational study of the work and learning of this team. Learning occurred in a wide variety of areas: running two teams on Mars time for three months; using the instruments within the constraints of the martian environment, the deep space network, and mission requirements; planning science strategy; using the available software tools effectively. This learning is preserved in many ways. Primarily it resides in people’s memories, to be carried on to the next mission. It is also encoded in stories, in programming sequences, in published reports, and in lessons learned activities. Studying learning and knowledge development as it happens allows us to suggest proactive ways to capture and use it across multiple missions and generations.

The Social Life of a Data Base
Charlotte Linde and Roxana Wales
Although computer data bases are thought of as technological tools, it takes multiple, invisible social practices to support their function. This paper demonstrates the social life of a data base: construction of data entries, human escorting of data within and across organizational boundaries, and social practices which compensate for design deficiencies, but also mask their existence. We describe a NASA data base for reporting problem repairs. This is a complex system, distributed among several NASA centers and contracting organizations. Its complexity is not unique: many public and private institutions maintain enormous data bases, incorporating legacy systems which are resistant to change because their structure is no longer apparent. This data base requires social work in every phase of use. Entry of problem reports is constrained by the physical structure of the repair setting, and by the local use of problem reports to schedule repairs. Using reports to determine flight readiness requires considerable human work: printing reports, routing them to appropriate decision makers, tracking the status of repairs and decisions. Indeed, one key system component is the secretary who drives printouts of serious problem reports to the main decision maker. This story has a moral both for social scientists and designers. Data entry, interpretation and use are intrinsically social activities. Therefore, the work of users that creates the social life of a complex memory technology is a fruitful research area for both social scientists and designers.

Narrative and Social Tacit Knowledge
Charlotte Linde
This paper discusses the role of narrative in the expression and transmission of social knowledge as a specific type of tacit knowledge. Narrative is a central mechanism by which social knowledge is conveyed. Narrative provides a bridge between the tacit and the explicit, allowing tacit social knowledge to be demonstrated and learned, without the need to propositionalize it. Institutions can best maintain their stock of stories by providing occasions on which they can be told. Archival systems such as data bases, lessons learned systems, and video records are less effective, particularly when they attempt to store records or transcripts of oral stories. However, they can be improved by attention to key design dimensions, including appropriate allocation of the effort required from system administrators and users, and attention to translation between genres.

The Acquisition of a Speaker by a Story: How History Becomes Memory and Identity
Charlotte Linde
This paper investigates narrative induction as one central means by which institutions acquire new members, and new members acquire a new identity. Narrative induction is the process by which people take on an existing set of stories as relevant to the shaping of their own story. Non-participant narratives (narratives told by speakers not present at the events narrated) are used to reproduce collective memory and induct new participants into this memory. The process has three parts: how a person comes to take on someone else’s story as centrally relevant to their own; how a person comes to tell their own story in a way shaped by the stories of others, and how a person’s story may come to be told and heard by others within an institution as an instance of a normative pattern. This paper demonstrates each phase of the process, using as data an ethnographic study of a major American insurance company.

Narrative In Institutions
Charlotte Linde
Within discourse analysis, narrative has been one of the major areas of research. Researchers have explored various levels of questions ranging from the formal structure of narrative, the relation of discourse structure to morphological and syntactic structure, the use of narrative in the presentation of self, and the work of narrative in small group interactions. This paper provides review of research on narratives in institutions, considering both the effect on the forms of narratives on their location within institutions, and the work that narratives do within and for those institutions. This question is important for linguistics, and for discourse analysis in particular, since institutional constraints have strong shaping effect on the narratives told within them, and reciprocally, narratives have a strong part in the creation and reproduction of institutions. In this paper, I propose that there are two basic approaches to the study of narrative in institutions. The first approach is the study of the way narrative is used to carry out the daily work of the institution. This can include both the use of narrative by members of the institution to do the daily work of the institution, as well as the attempts of non-members to use narrative in professional settings such as legal or medical situations, where professionals require the use of specialized, privileged forms of discourse. The second approach is the study of the work that narrative performs in institutions to reproduce the institution, reproduce or challenge the power structures of the institution, induct new members, create the identity of the institution and its members, adapt to change, and deal with contested or contradictory versions of the past. We may understand this as the way an institution uses narrative to create and reproduce its identity by the creation and maintenance of an institutional memory.

Cemetaries, Oak Trees and Black and White Cows: Learning to Participate on the Internet
Vicki O'Day, Mizuko Ito, Charlotte Linde, Annette Adler and Elizabeth Mynatt
Designers of Internet applications and those involved in helping others learn about the net need to understand the problems Internet newcomers face as they encounter the idiosyncratic structures that organize the networked world. As part of an ethnographic study of SeniorNet, an organization that helps seniors learn to use computers, we explore early encounters with the networked world by analyzing questions asked in introductory computer classes. These questions, grounded in newcomers’ prior experience, show how the taken-for-granted assumptions and strategies underlying successful Internet use differ from those in other domains. The questions and analysis are grouped in the following categories: identity on the Internet; boundaries and scope of the Internet; boundaries and scope of the personal computer; and organizations and providers in the networked world.

Trying Not to Build the Same Old Spacecraft: Structural and Political Issues in Design Inheritance

This paper explores design inheritance, detailing the ways in which people and institutions attempt to plan for inheritance or to avoid being locked into the consequences of previous design decisions. This research site provides an ideal opportunity to see the designers struggling to produce a acceptable present that will constrain the future for decades.